Codec support

Video and audio codecs supported by the Livepeer network for transcoding, ingest, and playback. Container formats, codec profiles, and limitations.

Livepeer transcoding supports a range of video and audio codecs for ingest, processing, and output. The underlying media library is LPMS (Livepeer Media Server), which uses FFmpeg and NVIDIA hardware encoding/decoding.

Video codecs

H.264 is the default output codec for HLS delivery. NVIDIA GPU-accelerated encoding (NVENC) and decoding (NVDEC) are used when available; software fallback handles non-NVIDIA environments.

Container formats

Format	Ingest	Output
RTMP/FLV	Yes (live ingest)	No
MP4	Yes (VOD upload)	Yes (VOD download)
HLS (MPEG-TS segments)	No	Yes (live + VOD playback)
WebM	Yes (VOD upload)	No
MOV, AVI, MKV, WMV	Yes (VOD upload)	No

VOD upload accepts MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM, MKV, WMV, and FLV. Files up to 10 GB are supported.

Audio codecs

Codec	Ingest	Output
AAC	Yes	Yes (default for HLS)
MP3	Yes (VOD)	No
Opus	Yes (WebRTC)	Yes (WebRTC)

AAC is the default audio codec for HLS output. WebRTC sessions use Opus.

The transcoding page covers transcoding profiles and configuration. The LPMS integration page covers the underlying media library.